At the beginning of last week, one of our clients launched a fascinating exhibit. We’ve been supporting them through the opening of that exhibit and they identified some problems that they needed taken care of by this upcoming Tuesday. Even with the pressure surrounding these issues for Tuesday, our team has executed brilliantly. We brought our own goals to fruition and took care of our client’s problems, as well. We didn’t allow one to suffer for the benefit of the other, we did both.

NextShout and ComicShout were both released on-time, today. Go check them out.

Great job and many thanks to the team at Omega Vortex. You guys are all awesome.

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power. - Bill Clinton

Say what you want about Bill Clinton, but that one line is probably the single best thing I think I’ve ever heard him say.

NextShout is now available for pre-order at $15 USD. Purchase it today to get it cheaper than the release price.

Stay tuned for more release information.

So, here’s my attempt to tear apart an e-mail from a retarded business executive. Some people’s names, product names, and location names have been changed to protect the guilty … or the mentally retarded.

First, the full e-mail. Read and enjoy. My comments will follow.

From: Jimi Hendrix (jimi.hendrix@planetces.com)
Sent: Mon, 8/18/2008 1:39pm
To: Eric Cartman (eric.cartman@planetces.com)
Subject: South Park visit

Eric,

I am putting the majority of my focus on South Park this week due to my recent observations & disappointment from my visit last week. I truly believe South Park could be the top location in the market on a consistent basis & believe we are not capitalizing on our opportunity there mainly because of weak & uneducated sales personnel. I am stepping in to help you fix this situation & gain back control of your location. Here are some my disappointments I observed.

1. Sales Rep not in proper dress attire (no tie).
2. Sales Reps not mentioning POOPS to any of the customers I observed.
3. Sales Reps not mentioning Sewer to any of the customers I observed.
4. Sales Rep stating “I really don’t know anything about the sewer line service, you can just go online to get it” when customer actually asked about sewer products.
5. Sale Rep stating “I really don’t know much about Business accounts so I hope I’m doing this right”
6. Sales Rep processing 2 JUAN payments without reviewing customers account or offering weapons, pipelines, sewer etc.

I am leading this Thursday’s evening weekly store meeting to assists you in setting the tone for a “MAJOR” mindset change in South Park. I expect the following to occur for my meeting on Thursday.

1. All South Park reps in attendance or they will be terminated.
2. No kids allowed. They have 3 days to obtain baby sitters.
3. Meeting will begin promptly at 7:30pm. Anyone late will be terminated.
4. All reps sitting at the conference table facing me, no one standing behind or lounging around
5. All reps with pen & note pad.
6. No food
7. All wireless devices turned off, no checking emails/texts/missed calls during my meeting.
8. Whiteboard/DSR updated through Wednesday
9. ALL REPS MADE AWARE THEIR JOBS ARE NOW BEING EVALUATED ON A DAILY BASIS BEGINNING WITH THIS MEETING.

Thanks,
Jimi

I’m sure you all see the massive point at the bottom. Jobs are being evaluated! Oooh. Scary. Let’s begin tearing this open, shall we? Starting from the top.

I truly believe South Park could be the top location in the market on a consistent basis & believe we are not capitalizing on our opportunity there mainly because of weak & uneducated sales personnel.

This is a massive insult to your employees. I hate companies that believe in frequent negative reinforcement and infrequent and random positive reinforcement. You’re a business. You have a right to be concerned about the bottom line, it’s part of the territory, but the devaluation of human beings in order to do it absolutely disgusts me.

I am stepping in to help you fix this situation & gain back control of your location.

This implies that you have no faith in one of your most capable managers. I know “Eric” personally and have known him for a long time. He’s easily one of the best managers I’ve ever had the opportunity to work for, and this statement alone should be extremely insulting to him. Even if it’s not, it’s &#%@ing insulting to me, you pompous little prick.

1. Sales Rep not in proper dress attire (no tie).

I’m sorry, but if “no tie” is on the top of your list of complaints, you seriously need to re-evaluate your priorities. Putting “no tie” at the very top of your list of complaints is probably one of the most retarded things I’ve seen come out of a business person in a long time. It happened to be 85 degrees (hey, why don’t you shell out some money to fix the freaking air conditioner in that store?) when the sales rep in question wasn’t wearing his tie. I wouldn’t have worn mine either and you, sir, would’ve received my warm regards if you had mentioned it to me.

2. Sales Reps not mentioning POOPS to any of the customers I observed.

Maybe they should think about how completely effed up and over-complicated the “POOPS” process is. If it wasn’t too much hassle for the customers and the sales reps, maybe it would be mentioned more often.

3. Sales Reps not mentioning Sewer to any of the customers I observed.
4. Sales Rep stating “I really don’t know anything about the sewer line service, you can just go online to get it” when customer actually asked about sewer products.

Isn’t the “sewer” services through Planet sort of new? The people in these stores were originally trained to sell wireless devices and services. You’re expecting someone who was just recently hired and someone who works VERY part-time to know that much about an obscure set of solutions that you just recently started offering? Personally, I applaud the sales rep for admitting his/her lack of knowledge on the subject and offering an alternative solution, instead of trying to make something up or giving the customer incorrect information. We’re humans, folks, we can’t do or know it all.

5. Sale Rep stating “I really don’t know much about Business accounts so I hope I’m doing this right”

If I remember correctly, the entire system to work with business accounts was totally screwed up the ENTIRE time I worked there. We had to be hackish and go in through *redacted*’s login just to be able to do ANYTHING to business accounts. We didn’t even figure out we could do that until the later part of my employment there.

6. Sales Rep processing 2 JUAN payments without reviewing customers account or offering weapons, pipelines, sewer etc.

Did it happen to occur to you that with the sheer number of repeat customers the store has that the sales reps may actually KNOW these people? While I was there, we quickly processed repeat customers payments all the time, because we knew who they were. They were in there all the time, we knew exactly what they wanted, and we got them out of there as quickly as possible. You can’t upsell to people with a purpose. If someone knows exactly what they want to do, they’re coming into the store to do exactly that.

1. All South Park reps in attendance or they will be terminated.
3. Meeting will begin promptly at 7:30pm. Anyone late will be terminated.

I wish these reps would organize with each other to just not show up. Don’t accept threats. You people aren’t being paid enough to deal with this garbage. The lot of you are intelligent people who can easily find jobs elsewhere. Let them find their poo-slinging monkeys that they can convert into button-pushing drones who care more about pushing something into a customer’s face instead of making sure they’re satisfied.

4. All reps sitting at the conference table facing me, no one standing behind or lounging around
7. All wireless devices turned off, no checking emails/texts/missed calls during my meeting.

This guy seems to think he’s God. I don’t give a rat’s behind if you’re anywhere near the executive ladder of this company. If you’re paying me the dirt-crap wages that were seen while I was working there, you’re not that important.

9. ALL REPS MADE AWARE THEIR JOBS ARE NOW BEING EVALUATED ON A DAILY BASIS BEGINNING WITH THIS MEETING.

When you take the human out of sales people, they become drones. People don’t like drones. You’re going to end up making your sales worse and killing off this store. After that rant, I think there’s only one thing I can say for Mr. Jimi Hendrix.

Effing lol.

After noticing someone on Twitter mention a LINQ to WMI project, it seemed like the perfect fit. LINQ (Language-Integrated Query) is something I’m not too familiar with and want to learn. While I’m somewhat familiar with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), it’s huge. There’s still plenty left to be learned about it.

I’ve become a developer on the LinqToWMI project at Microsoft’s CodePlex and I’ve already made two major updates for those who are interested. One of which is the ability to generate “Commonly Used” WMI classes instead of just generating the ones you need one at a time. The next is a major speed enhancing change on the ClassGenerator.

It came to my attention while testing the project that it would crash with a NullReferenceException if there were no instances available of the class you wanted to generate. (Example: It would crash when trying to generate a Win32_FloppyDrive class. My laptop has no floppy drive.) In re-working the generator to not use an instance to generate code from, we gained a pretty huge speed boost from not having to search for an instance. Before, it took about 4 or 5 seconds to generate around 15 classes. Now it takes a fraction of a second.

If you’re needing to use the WMI on a project and want an easy way to query it, give this project a shot. If you think it’s good, help us out by contributing patches or bug reports so we can make the project even better.

A runner up that I’m going to give a nod to is Omega Vortex. Jeremy Privett knows what he’s doing when it comes to setting up a good, fluid development shop. The only reason I can’t 100% vouch for their work is that they haven’t released anything yet, and I’ve not worked with their custom shop. Good group to keep an eye on though.

Admittedly, Omega Vortex fell into the “fake” category not too many years ago before I was swept off to Colorado to go work at Completely Unique and Peak8. I filed papers on GU² Services, Inc. before it was acquired and wanted to file papers on Omega Vortex but never really got around to it until after the Peak8 era.

We do have papers, though! They’re currently in the wrong state, but Alabama’s business laws are incredibly annoying compared to Colorado’s so I may try to put off legally moving the company out of Colorado until I move to NY sometime within the next year. Unless there’s some legal reason to do otherwise which I’m not aware of. We don’t currently have any type of office space, as all of our employees work remotely, so our physical address is pretty much non-existent.

We’re working on fixing that unreleased products issue in the coming months and I’ve been working on ramping up our software division for more progress, now that we’re getting to the point where we can look at it again. Since we have some new people on our team, consulting work should no longer completely bog us down so that no work gets done in our software. We’ll have to see how it goes from here.

Quite a while ago, Omega Vortex adopted a policy that we would refrain from announcing specific release dates. We won’t even narrow it down to a month for you. There’s quite a few reasons that we do this.

We’re a startup that’s bootstrapping from consulting work. At any given time, said consulting work currently takes priority over all other things, because we have to make money in order to pay bills and keep developers paid. That’s all fine and dandy, but while we’re having to focus so much on consulting, software isn’t being written. This is eating us like the plague. We’re presently amazingly profitable, but not in the way that we want to be. No matter how good our scheduling is, it doesn’t make a difference because we’re constantly having to drop everything to invest time in a new consulting project.

On the plus side, we’re about to simultaneously release a new product that hasn’t been announced yet along with updates to two other products that you may already be familiar with. No matter how close we get to that day, we’re not going to tell you when that day will be, in advance. All of our releases are marked by quarters. Any one year is divided up into three month quarters. Q1 is January - March, Q2 is April - June, Q3 is July - September, and Q4 is October - December. That means that when we mark a release as Q3 of 2008, we could potentially release that product at any point within those three months. If we’re expecting to release in September, we’ll actually really say Q4 so that we have three extra months worth of time buffer to use in the even that something goes wrong. If we happen to meet our goal of September, we just managed to release an entire month early.

Three months of buffer is a pretty decent amount of time. Sadly, because of time constraints with our consulting work, we’re still having trouble meeting those release dates. OmegaVerge has suffered considerably because of this and it has allowed competitors to get a jump on us. (Speaking of OmegaVerge, I’d like to give a shoutout to Ben Babcock who actually managed to help me with a SimpleXML issue by letting me help him with a SimpleXML issue. We now have type-safety/inference of IP.Converge methods in OmegaVerge since we solved that issue, instead of having to pass around SimpleXMLElement objects. Thanks, Ben.)

If you’re a software development shop and, like us, you can’t dedicate 100% of your time to software development, don’t announce release dates. Even vague ones. Surprise people. People get incredibly antsy / angry when you don’t meet release dates.

Oh, and if you have a historic trend of lack of ability to execute, don’t try to say things like “this summer” or “next month” … I’m guilty of this too, but this is a practice that really needs to stop. I’ve seen so many projects say “next month” and it take so much longer than that. Two in particular have me facepalming, right now …

Most of your [code] comments are unnecessary.

Don’t ever tell a developer that. Especially, one that is learning. Code commenting is one of biggest components of code maintainability and there are simply not enough developers that do it enough. The thought that someone really would instill the thought that comments are unnecessary really peeves me. I’ve had so many problems over the years that could’ve been solved if the programmer before me had just commented his stuff properly.

Don’t be this idiot.